Day of the Sugar Buns

We dragged our stuff down from our fourth floor hideout, stopping to wash our pots to eradicate the odour of fish (possibly for the last time?) which had clung on from the previous evening. Before cycling out of Baoji, we sat down at a street stall for a breakfast of silken tofu and mystery substance a little like processed meat, a little like hard tofu. We hit the road, and were treated to 25k of skyscrapers, set against the palid backdrop of smog. In this sort of circumstance, food comes to the fore, and we soon stopped for a sugar bun thing (white and brown sugar in batter, deep fried). Delicious. Town blended into countryside (Central China seems to be cultivated everywhere…no scrap of land is too small for a cabbage patch), and we passed a series of fruit processing plants, huge pictures of apples, kiwis, strawberries, cherries, kumquats, and so on by the side of the road. By midday we had made good progress, and decided to break by the side of the road, when a guy welcomed us in for tea. He was soon called away on business, however, and his son took over, gave us fruit and sour noodles (a new taste). We pushed on through a series of villages, before stopping for second meal (mealtimes no longer have much meaning, we just eat all the time) in an eatery owned by a nice couple who gave us baijao [ED: BaiJiu, means white alcohol…], a Chinese spirit. We stopped off to investigate a funny Confucian temple, before N feet a bit dodgy, and we wheeled off the road into a fruit field to set up the tent. Bike cleaning and an early night ensued!